Today is All Saints Day. It is a day in the Christian calendar set aside to remember those who have gone before. Though I no longer hold to the metaphysics of heaven or canonization, I find in this day a ritual value that persists beyond belief. It is a day of memory, a day of names. A day that reminds us that our lives are layered atop the ashes and labors of others.
When I look at Roberto Ferri’s Cupo Fuoco II, I see the visual language of this same remembrance. The woman, crowned in roses, gazes past the skull she cradles not in fear, but in recognition. She holds death as one might hold a relic. Her flesh glows with the heat of life, while the skull, brittle and colorless, bears a single flower pressed between its teeth. It is the most eloquent of all symbols: beauty and decay sharing the same breath.
The Latin phrase memento mori — remember that you must die — has haunted Christian art for centuries. But I do not take it as morbid instruction. Rather, I see it as an ethical and aesthetic principle: to remember that one’s time is finite is to sharpen the value of every living moment. In Ferri’s chiaroscuro world, that knowledge is rendered in light itself. Death exists not in opposition to life, but as its boundary and therefore its form. Without the skull, her tenderness has no context; without the darkness, there is no illumination.
All Saints Day, viewed through this lens, becomes a communal memento mori. It gathers the memory of all those who lived and died and insists that we are part of that same continuum. The saints, stripped of their supernatural trappings, become human exemplars. They become those who wrestled, erred, loved, and died. In the Book of Wisdom it is written, “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them.” I read that now as poetry, not doctrine: a metaphor for the endurance of influence, the way a life well-lived continues to shape others even after the body is gone.
Ferri’s painting belongs to a long lineage of sacred and symbolic imagery. It echoes the penitential portraits of Mary Magdalene, who so often sat beside a skull in contemplation, the emblem of her repentance and her recognition of mortality. In those Baroque canvases by Caravaggio, de la Tour, and Ribera, the Magdalene’s sensual beauty coexisted with her spiritual awakening. Ferri reinterprets that tradition for a secular age: his subject is not penitent but aware. The roses adorning her headscarf recall the crowns of the saints, yet they are fresh, fragrant, mortal. Even the skull evokes not despair but dialogue. She is not renouncing the world; she is comprehending it.
In this way Cupo Fuoco II extends the vanitas tradition, those 17th-century still lifes that paired blossoms with skulls, gold with decay. Their purpose was to remind the viewer that all things pass. Yet Ferri’s modern sensibility introduces tenderness where once there was warning. The memento mori becomes not a threat but an invitation to live fully, knowing the cost.
On a day like this, I think of those who shaped me: family, friends, teachers, artists long dead whose works still stir me. Their absence is not an emptiness but a contour, like the negative space that gives a painting depth. I honor them not with prayer, but with attention. To remember them is to participate in the long human project of meaning-making, the same project that produced both the saints and the artists who painted them.
As Ferri reminds me, the task is not to flee the skull, but to hold it tenderly, to understand that within its hollow sockets once burned the same dark fire that now burns in me. And when mine, too, is extinguished, perhaps something of that light will remain in the minds I’ve touched, the works I’ve made, or simply in the continuing bloom of life that grows, impossibly, out of death.
“It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting,
for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart.”
— Ecclesiastes 7:2